Sijie Hu is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Social Sciences at The University of Hong Kong.  She received her Ph.D. (2021) in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her B.A. (2014) and M.A. (2016) from Renmin University of China.  Before joining HKU, she was an Assistant Professor of Economic History at the School of Economics, Renmin University of China.

Her research interests centre on Chinese economic history, historical demography, and population economics, with particular emphasis on demographic change, social mobility, and human capital formation in Ming–Qing China.  She is currently engaged in projects that investigate micro-demographic dynamics in traditional Chinese society using large-scale genealogical data.

Dr. Nanxun (Agnes) Li is a family sociologist whose research focuses on fatherhood, parenting, social policy, child development, and population studies. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2023.  Prior to joining HKU, she held research appointments as a Research Fellow at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and as a Scientist at the Institute for Human Development and Potential, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR IHDP).  She has extensive experience in early childhood development research and was a core member of the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-LEADS).  Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Indicators Research, and Social Policy and Society.

Xingyun Wu is a sociologist and social demographer who joined the HKU Research Hub of Population Studies as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2025.  Her primary research areas include social inequality, work and family, and population health, with a methodological focus on quantitative and computational methods.  Her dissertation project investigates how social structures shape the daily-life decisions and behaviours of individuals and families in the US, expanding the analytic capacity of nationally representative survey datasets with computational methods.  Her work demonstrates how gender convergence is interdependent across spheres and persons, and how the convergence in work and family leads to more sustainable lifestyles and developmental opportunities for the whole population.

In addition to her independent research, she has also collaborated on interdisciplinary research projects on the following topics: adolescent health and preventive care receipts, population and places in response to environmental hazards, and student-AI interaction in college education.  The collaborative projects reflect her broader research interests in how structural forces shape individual opportunities and behaviours and lead to social disparities in the population.

Through her work, she aims to provide a deeper understanding of social phenomena and mechanisms underlying social inequality to inform policies that foster greater social equity and a healthier population.  Building on these foundations, she is now extending her research agenda to include social and demographic patterns in Asian societies. 

Chunxue Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Hong Kong. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, an M.A. in Sociology from Renmin University of China, and a B.A. in Sociology from Shandong University. Her research interests focus on migration, family demography, and social inequality.